Captain Ryoji Uehara was killed during an attack on the US Fleet at the battle of Okinawa, May 11th 1945. He was 22 years old. Among his personal effects was a book on philosophy by Benedetto Croce, in the cover of which he had written:

"Goodbye, my beloved Kyoko-chan. I loved you so much; but even then you were already engaged, so it was very painful for me. Thinking only of your happiness, I suppressed the urge to whisper into your ear that I loved you. I love you still."

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.

Friedrich Nietzsche from The Will to Power.

Arno Breker - The wounded

Matt Cunningham

Jelka von Langen

Erich Maria Remarque with his dog, 1929

“Every word is a prejudice.”

—Human, All Too Human, “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” §55.

Saint Sebastian (details). By the painters: Jusepe de Ribera and Guido Reni.

It is a monstrous act of violence to begin something.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Letter from the Young Worker” in Letters to A Young Poet

Balestrand, Norway, 1962.

“The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.”

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985)

Photo from the general public bath used by Yakuza (1947).

Jupiter and the Moons

Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. Everything passes.
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

It continued: darkness, then light; light, then darkness. I finished the wine and went out for more. I came back, undressed, got back in bed. The arrival and departure of the faces continued; I felt I was having a vision. I was being visited by hundreds of devils that the Devil Himself couldn't tolerate.
I drank more wine.